Once you have been using HootSuite to manage your social media activity for a while, you're going to want to set up reports and systems to measure your success. We're going to review how to set those reports up in one of our HootSuite Series posts, but before we do, you need to make sure that you've connected your Google Analytics account to your HootSuite account.

Log into your HootSuite dashboard (http://hootsuite.com/dashboard) and click on the Analytics button in the left menu.

Website analytics is a Big Data gathering method that can give you an average 117 percent return on investment, or as much as 2,000 percent, according to International Data Corporation, a Massachussetts-based research firm. If you have a few minutes per day to devote to implementing an analytics-based marketing strategy, you can see revenue improvement within a few months. It will tell you what is working on your business's website, and what is not.

Dashboard Pro is the mobile app that I use daily to monitor statistical performance of both my own and my client's websites. Connected to my Google Analytics account, it shows dashboard data for the most commonly sought questions: how many visitors today? Where are these visitors coming from? What articles and content are getting the most traffic right now?

As we continue to explore Google Analytics, one of the key areas of attention is Referring Sites. These are the sites that sent traffic to you. This is a critical statistic for understanding where your visitors are coming from so that you can gauge the effectiveness of your advertising and social media campaigns.

More and more business owners have started to recognize that Google is no longer providing all of the keyword data that it used to within Google Analytics. If you monitor your website analytics regularly, you may have noticed that your Keyword report is showing more (not provided) than other keywords. This has search engine marketers and business owners more than a little concerned!

It is critical in every business that there be metrics in place to measure every possible aspect of the business so that we can gauge whether or not those aspects are getting better or worse. The more accurate and easier to obtain the metrics are, the better. Businesses need to be able to see, at a glance, information like how many units were sold for given period, what the profit margin was, what the business costs were, how many new customers, and so on. The business also needs to be able to measure the effectiveness of certain activities, including sales and marketing.